Tree of Life Visitor Recommendations

The ToL currently provides more than 3000 web pages with information about organisms, and we anticipate that this number will increase considerably within the next couple of years. It is one of the goals of the ToL project to encourage visitors to explore a variety of organisms by browsing along the branches of the ToL. Among this abundance of information, how can you find the most interesting pages?

Different people will have different interests and preferences; e.g., some people may be interested in flowers, others in dinosaurs. However, a page that is well written, tells a compelling story, or provides stunning images will be highly valued by visitors, no matter what organism the page is about.

In order to give people the opportunity to guide fellow visitors to materials they find particularly interesting, we will soon implement an open visitor recommendation system for the ToL site. People who wish to participate in this feature will be able to provide ratings and structured feedback regarding the merits of individual ToL pages. These ratings will provide ToL authors with feedback about the reception of their work, and ratings will be compiled into "most popular lists" that will supplement our current ToL browsing tools.